


out past the land mines

by beardsley



Category: Bomb Girls
Genre: F/F, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-18
Updated: 2013-05-18
Packaged: 2017-12-12 03:10:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/806501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/beardsley/pseuds/beardsley
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three months, two weeks and four days after everything ends, Betty gets separated from the group.</p>
            </blockquote>





	out past the land mines

**Author's Note:**

> Title from TV on the Radio.

Three months, two weeks and four days after everything ends, Betty gets separated from the group. It's a daft mistake and she knows whatever she gets, she damn well deserves. Mistakes get you killed. If she's incompetent, she's better off dead rather than endangering the others.

That's what she tells herself as a pack of shambling, half-rotten corpses back her into an alley. She tells herself her life has always been an exercise in things she couldn't have — normalcy, love, even a goddamn house of her own — and maybe survival is just one more of those.

She takes a step back, then another, and pretends she's not terrified. She pretends she isn't scared of dying, because pretending might at least give her some dignity and all things considered, even if there's no one there to see it, Betty thinks she would like to die with some dignity. She never let anyone put her down, men or women or soldiers or crooks, and she ain't about to start now.

She steps on something and has to catch herself from falling, and when she drops her eyes to the ground she sees it: a tire iron, rusty and with blood and messier things long-dried on its curved end. Slowly, moving like through a thick fog, Betty bends down to pick it up. No sudden movements, nothing to set off the undead. The trick is to keep them calm, or what passes for calm as far as they're concerned, because when they're calm they're slow, and when they're slow and lazy they will only swarm you and tear you to shreds once they get a good whiff of your blood.

Betty isn't bleeding. She checked herself for cuts and bruises that morning. Three of the undead don't have eyes any more, and the other two look at her with confused disinterest even as they advance towards her.

'They decompose,' Sheila had said, voice already shaky and weak with the infection destroying her body from the inside. 'The longer you last, the less dangerous they'll become — their sense of smell will get weaker, and smell is what they use most. Promise me,' she'd asked of Lorna, 'promise you'll be careful, mum, promise you'll survive.'

Lorna had promised, because she couldn't have done anything else. She had promised and held her daughter's hand as Betty and Vera stood behind her ready to pry her off if they had to, right until the convulsions started and Sheila's eyes glazed over and she was no longer anyone's daughter. That's what Vera told Lorna, as Reggie and Narenda dragged Sheila away to be — to be put down. Before she could hurt someone.

Lorna's screams had drowned out the shot.

Now, her fingers gripping the tire iron tight enough she can hear her bones creak, all Betty can think of is the flat look in Sheila's eyes as she'd turned into a monster. The undead before her are nothing like that; there is none of that visceral rage left in them, no feverish brightness to their eyes. They look resigned, and tired, and in the past three months Betty has learned more about the stages of decomposition of the human body than she ever wanted to. Even in the dead of winter she knows they don't have long before the skin starts peeling off of them, before the muscles fall apart — and once the muscles fall apart, the only danger they'll pose is if someone steps on them.

It's just her bloody luck that she crossed this pack's path while they're still upright, if slow, and ready to tear her limbs from her body.

'Come get it,' Betty whispers, more to give herself some sad approximation of fake bravery than anything else. 'You want it, you're gonna have to come and get it, you ugly fuckers.'

The corpse on the left lifts its head — Betty can't tell if it used to be a man or a woman — and looks at her, just _looks_ at her, and a cold shiver runs down Betty's spine.

Goodbye, life, she thinks to herself. It's been a hoot. Even inside her own head she sounds bitter, but still frightened like a small child. She hates it.

One to five. Betty never faced good odds in her whole damn life. She lifts the tire iron.

There is a commotion at the mouth of the alley, and then a loud crack — and the corpse closest to Betty drops like a sack of potatoes, its head a mess of blood and brain matter and skull shards and gore. Something bright flashes between the standing undead, the edge of a skirt — then another crack, another headshot, another body hitting the ground with a heavy thud.

Belatedly, Betty realises she's got a weapon of her own. She takes a swing and smashes the head of the corpse on the far right. Another shot; she hears and doesn't have to see the fourth undead dropping, dead again and for good this time, and before she can take out the final one there's a meaty whump and the alley is clear, save for — air rushes out of Betty's lungs, because the last people left standing are Vera, closer to the entrance to the alley and with a Luger held in both hands with expert dexterity, and Kate, wielding a rusted steel pipe like a sword.

'Oh,' Betty manages, relief washing over her like a tidal wave, sudden and overwhelming. The tire iron falls from her hands and clatters to the ground.

Kate drops the pipe. Before Betty can react she's enveloped in a suffocating bear hug, Kate's arms so tight around her it's hard to breathe.

'Betty, oh, Betty —' Kate's voice, muffled as it is against Betty's collar, shakes audibly. 'Thank god, I thought you were — thank god you're all right —' With an impatient noise Kate lets her go, and it happens in a split second: she cups Betty's face in both hands and kisses her right on the mouth, quick and sloppy and graceless and breathtaking. Betty freezes, and after a moment Kate pulls back. Her eyes are wide and bright, and she wraps her arms around Betty again.

'You are never allowed to go anywhere by yourself again,' she murmurs against Betty's neck. Slowly, still more than a little dazed, Betty lifts one hand to stroke Kate's hair. The other inches around her waist, almost on automatic — almost.

'You gave us a scare,' says Vera. When Betty looks to her, she's stuffed the gun into the waistband of her trousers and is making her way towards them, and then her arms are around both Betty and Kate and she breathes out, like touching Betty is the one thing that could convince her this is real. 'Mrs Corbett is besides herself with worry.'

Betty manages a weak laugh. 'Just Mrs Corbett?'

'Of course not just her, you dummy. Stop fishing for compliments.'

'Thought I was a goner,' Betty whispers into Kate's hair. Adrenaline and terror and tension start slowly, muscle by muscle, seeping out of her body. She's exhausted. Three days she had been gone, and she's exhausted.

Vera is the first to let go. She takes a step back, and when she catches sight of the way Betty holds Kate close she smiles, small and knowing. It only gets wider when she sees Betty go red in the face. Yeah, something definitely happened there; it seems to take a lot of self-restraint for Kate to pull away, and even then she grabs Betty's hand and laces their fingers together. Her mouth is set in a thin line that speaks of determination. She doesn't look to be letting go of Betty any time soon, and heat pools in the pit of Betty's stomach. She's…she's fine with that. More than fine.

'Are you ready to go back?' Kate asks. There's a bit of colour high in her cheeks. Betty would kiss her again, but they're in a blind alley in a ghost city and it's not safe, so she just squeezes Kate's hand and nods.

'Yeah. Let's go home.'

It's not until later, much later — after Lorna holds her for a solid hour before peeling herself away, after Gladys tries to subtly wipe the tears from her eyes and fails, after Reggie yells at her for being an idiot; after they go to sleep for the night with Vera on watch duty, and after Kate crawls under Betty's blanket and curls around her back, warm and steady and alive, her breath on the back of Betty's neck the only comfort she could ever ask for — it's not until after all that that she realises what she said.

 _Home_. It's a joke, and a pretty sick one at that. Nowhere is home in this brave new world, where the only things left are death and desolation and the dead risen hungry and frenzied like rabid animals. How could anything be home?

Except that's not true.

The world has gone to hell, one war giving way to another, more horrific and vicious for all it's not fought by soldiers and there are no sides. At the end of the day, though, there are six of them together and they'll stay together come hell or high water, and it's not that it is the home Betty knows or wants or longs for; no. It's the only home she needs.

Kate's hand is resting against her stomach. Betty covers it with her own, and violent dreams don't wake her at all that night.


End file.
